The "extra-terrestrial" entrepreneur Delian Asparouhov: From small Bulgaria to the boundless Space

Space factories, cities and highways, orbital hotels and colonies on the Moon and Mars, in general - life beyond the limits of the Earth and doing business among the stars. All this still sounds like science fiction stuff, yet not quite. Little by little, what once seemed like impossible dreams are starting to materialize, and one of the most intriguing developments in that sphere has Bulgarian roots.

Only three years after its creation, Varda Space Industries, a Californian company founded by Delian Asparouhov, managed to launch the first pharmaceutical space factory. This happened in June, and the facility has already produced its first drug in conditions of microgravity - now awaiting approval from US regulators to bring the product back to Earth.

We meet Delian during his short visit to Sofia. He says he likes the city a lot more now, in September when it’s "so much more alive" compared to the hot, desolate summer months of his childhood.

Delian left Bulgaria when he was 3 years old and together with his parents moved to the USA. While a student, he used to come back every year around July-August, during his summer vacation. Later the visits thinned out. But even now – as a household name in Silicon Valley, as a protege of the illustrious Peter Thiel, and one of the most promising young investors across the Atlantic – his connection to his homeland is still strong, and the determination to strengthen it through his business activities seems firm.

In a melodically broken Bulgarian, he talks about his ambitious project with Varda, his understanding of entrepreneurship and the future of the promising space industry.

Before space

Delyan is only 29 years old, but in fact he has been investing for a decade under the mentorship of Peter Thiel, the creator of the online payment system Pay Pal and one of the first to recognize the viability of companies like Facebook, Airbnb, SpaceX and a bunch of other tech giants.

Not yet 20 years old, Delian joined the Thiel Fellowship program, which gives 20 grants of $100,000 each to students from around the world ready to leave university and pursue their own projects. Delian dropped out of MIT and began developing his mobile app, Nightingale.

The idea for the app came after his grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Its aim is to improve the patient’s treatment quality both in the hospital and at home by means of new technologies.

Today, Delian is already a principal at Thiel's venture capital fund - Founders Fund, where he is gaining experience as an investor.

What is Varda and what is its aim?

Varda Space Industries is one of the promising space companies today, and its potential is evidenced by its external capital funding to the tune of 54 million dollars, plus a 60-million-dollar contract with the US Air Force.

In June, the company sent its first factory into space, and at the end of the same month, it managed to produce the first medication substance. The synthesis itself takes 27 hours, and to the question of why move the production process up there, when there are enough pharmaceutical factories down on Earth, the answer lies in microgravity – a condition where Earth's gravity is eliminated in the orbit. Thanks to this, protein crystals grown in space form more perfect structures.

Our clients come to us when they have a problem," commented Delian Asparouhov, but says he still cannot speak publicly about them.

The company’s goal is to make small-molecule drugs for cancer and brain diseases. In the first 2-3 years it will manufacture classical medications based on chemical reactions, before moving on to more advanced drugs based on biological synthesis.

We are working on the active ingredients. They form 1-2% of a pill taken by a patient", explains Delian and adds that 30 kg of a substance can be distributed in medicines for over 100 million patients.

There won't be any more missions this year, but if all goes well, three such are planned for 2024, between six and ten in 2025, and one or two each month after that.

The first mission is the most expensive, at a cost of 12 million dollars. The fourth one will drop to 8 million dollars, the fifth - to 4 million dollars, and the eighth should require less than 3 million dollars.

At the moment, we buy many components from other companies, which are more expensive and too powerful for our needs, because they are made for satellites that stay there for years, and we only need them for a few weeks", Delian Asparouhov points out.

Subsequently, these parts will be replaced with cheaper ones, some perhaps manufactured in-house, and the capsule will become reusable.

Familiar ideas at the right time

Delian says he's been thinking about the idea since 2010, but at the time space launches were still very expensive. Therefore, his plan was to first gain experience and fortune from investments in traditional technologies, and then sometime around the age of 40 jump into the space industry. However, by 2017, Elon Musk had made the long-awaited industry breakthrough by demonstrating the reusability of a single rocket and virtually democratizing access to outer space.

This gave Delian the impetus to proceed with his business venture much earlier than anticipated. At first, he looked around for companies to simply invest in, but after not finding any, he decided to create one himself. In 2020, he managed to form a team of specialists who had worked in companies such as SpaceX and Tesla. This team has managed to make rapid progress.

In fact, nothing that Varda does or uses can be considered innovative in itself.

But all elements together represent an innovative model that has never existed before", says the company founder.

Drugs, for example, were first produced on the International Space Station as early as the 1970s, proving the advantage of microgravity. In these cases, however, they were limited to the use of more dangerous and risky substances.

We can take even more dangerous chemicals. Our processes are fully automated. And besides, most space capsules available are made for humans – like CrewDragoin and Apolo. Whereas ours is the first one that costs $500,000 and can regularly transport medicines.”

Varda's mission, in Delian's words, is "to expand the economic frontiers of the human species."

If you look at human history, we've been able to settle permanently somewhere rather than go once when it made economic sense to be there. If we look at what is happening in space, most things currently there do not make economic sense to be there", explains Delian giving astronauts as an example.

The United States set foot on the Moon decades ago, but they have not repeated this because there is no economic sense of sending someone there just for the sake of having a trip.

If you look at the factories on Earth, they are being automated, but they still need people for some things. When our factories get large enough, one day we'll be able to pay for people to go to space."

The future of the space industry

Space is vast and holds enormous possibilities. But to realize the ambitious and bold ideas of human colonies on Mars, for example, a few other things have to happen first. Delian makes an analogy with the development of the Internet and the subsequent generations of tech companies along with it.

First came the companies in the 1990s that built the necessary infrastructure. Then there were those of the dot-com era that invented new business models by stepping on the web. Another generation later, it was the turn of server and cloud technologies, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), which paved the way for the wave of modern shared services, such as Uber and Airbnb.

"It's more or less the same situation in Space," Delian notes. The first generation are Musk's rockets and the very first business models, which are Internet communications and Earth imaging. He compares the current moment to the time around 2010. Now, like the emergence of cloud infrastructure then – there are also cheap SpaceX rockets.

It is now the turn of the second-generation businesses to arrive – the moment when you don't have to work on infrastructure, and you can start thinking about developments."

The price evolution speaks volumes – in 2017, the use of a rocket cost about 50 million US dollars, whereas now Varda paid only 1.8 million dollars for the same service.

According to Delian, it is time to build space factories, space gas stations and space repair shops. In the next 5-6 years, there won't be many interesting things happening. But when these three models succeed, there will be more exciting new business opportunities - such as searching for water on the moon, mining asteroids, hotels and tourism.

You have to look at this in layers. You have to build the rockets first, then the space factories, and only then the more interesting stuff comes.”

Translated by Tzvetozar Vincent Iolov